Hi creator here, just got in from a few beers to see on HN which is amazing to see! I’ve only been coding for about 20+ months or so and this has been my evening/weekend project for the past few months, its a very new site, only out for about 5 weeks now. There are still lots of things to improve but the feedback has been amazing.

I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment, deep down I want to offer free a service which helps people collaborate on important work. Ideally with premium accounts subsidising a free but fully functional accounts. i.e. help people work together first, make a living second.

Many web pages are full of small icons and script references. The speed of those transfers is limited by network delay instead of bandwidth. SPDY ramps up the parallelism which in turn removes the serialized delays experienced by HTTP/1 and the end result is faster page load time. By using fewer connections, SPDY also saves the time and CPU needed to establish those connections.

Wrttn is a simple notepad with many useful features, the main one being that you can save as much text as you like while taking advantage of the formatting options markup languages such as Textile or Markdown give you.

This means that you can use wrttn to jot down ideas, write an article, an essay, a collection of media (more on this later) or anything your heart desires: both privately (by not sharing the link), or publicly (by sharing the link).

PpcSoft iKnow is designed to be very easy to use for beginners, but still powerful enough to keep up with you as your needs grow !

If all you need is 3-4 yellow notes to manage your information, any tool will do the trick (you don’t even need a separate tool). However, many knowledge workers today are experiencing information overload as the amount of information is exploding, and the tools are not able to keep up (folder hierarchies, tags and mind maps won’t scale).

When we designed PpcSoft iKnow, we researched how to successfully cope with huge amounts of information, and found that the answer was Wikipedia and Google.

By combining the power of linking and search you will find what you need when you need it !

Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: ”Find me that document about the chimpanzees!” That’s searching. The other feels different, so different that we don’t quite have a verb for it: it’s riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful.

Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas. I’m now working on a project that involves the history of the London sewers. The other day I ran a search that included the word ”sewage” several times. Because the software knows the word ”waste” is often used alongside ”sewage” it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn’t conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I’m not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.

But there’s a fundamental difference between searching a universe of documents created by strangers and searching your own personal library. When you’re freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated — particularly when you’d long ago forgotten about them — there’s something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.

The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn’t yet changed the way we think.

But 2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality for people who manipulate words for a living, thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs all aiming to do for your personal information what Google has done for the Internet. These programs all work in slightly different ways, but they share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents; and the ability to filter through thousands of documents in the time it takes to have a sip of coffee. Put those two elements together and you have a tool that will have as significant an impact on the way writers work as the original word processors did.

.) The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have influenced me.

in finding documents I’ve forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn’t know I was looking for.

some on the neural architecture that triggers facial expressions, others on the evolutionary history of the smile, still others that dealt with the expressiveness of our near relatives, the chimpanzees. Invariably, one or two of these would trigger a new association in my head — I’d forgotten about the chimpanzee connection — and I’d select that quote, and ask the software to find a new batch of documents similar to it. Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.